Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

fork: do not invoke uffd on fork if error occurs

Patch series "fork: do not expose incomplete mm on fork".

During fork we may place the virtual memory address space into an
inconsistent state before the fork operation is complete.

In addition, we may encounter an error during the fork operation that
indicates that the virtual memory address space is invalidated.

As a result, we should not be exposing it in any way to external machinery
that might interact with the mm or VMAs, machinery that is not designed to
deal with incomplete state.

We specifically update the fork logic to defer khugepaged and ksm to the
end of the operation and only to be invoked if no error arose, and
disallow uffd from observing fork events should an error have occurred.

This patch (of 2):

Currently on fork we expose the virtual address space of a process to
userland unconditionally if uffd is registered in VMAs, regardless of
whether an error arose in the fork.

This is performed in dup_userfaultfd_complete() which is invoked
unconditionally, and performs two duties - invoking registered handlers
for the UFFD_EVENT_FORK event via dup_fctx(), and clearing down
userfaultfd_fork_ctx objects established in dup_userfaultfd().

This is problematic, because the virtual address space may not yet be
correctly initialised if an error arose.

The change in commit d24062914837 ("fork: use __mt_dup() to duplicate
maple tree in dup_mmap...

Classification

CVE ID: CVE-2024-50220

CVSS Base Severity: LOW

CVSS Base Score: 0.0

Affected Products

Vendor: Linux

Product: Linux

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

EPSS Score: 0.05% (probability of being exploited)

EPSS Percentile: 17.81% (scored less or equal to compared to others)

EPSS Date: 2025-02-03 (when was this score calculated)

References

https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/92b472945dbf8abc020e9259c0088026f7027dfc
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f64e67e5d3a45a4a04286c47afade4b518acd47b
https://project-zero.issues.chromium.org/issues/373391951

Timeline